("Steal My Idea" shamelessly stolen from Jeff Chausse)

I use the Catch the Bus app to figure out when I can expect to be on a warm ride before my 20-minute wintery walk around the pond to work. We've had so much snow lately that some roads are reduced to single lanes, and high piles of snow make turning corners very difficult and risky. Traffic has been really slow! This wreaks havoc on apps like Catch the Bus, which must use the GPS location of buses combined with the approximate speed limit of a street to tell you when the bus is coming.

I could see the next bus a half mile down the road, and it was quite clear that the slow traffic would delay this bus by another 3 minutes, despite Catch the Bus telling me I had < 1 minute to wait.

Here's the idea that I want somebody to steal: with the GPS coordinates, you know where the buses are, and given two GPS coordinates and time, you know how slow the traffic is moving. Remember how slow the traffic is moving for segments of roads, and use that value to determine approximately when the next bus is coming.

That's it. Use real-time speed data to predict the arrival time for a bus, instead of relying on a static value for road speed.

When weather events come close to surpassing a previous record, part of me hopes the record is indeed topped, because that would at least make the trouble feel worth something. In Boston, we've had around 70-77 inches of snow so far - still shy of the 1995/1996 record of 107 inches, but winter's not over yet.

How will we better cope with snowfall 20, 50, or 100 years from now? Here are some ideas.

1. Sidewalks that are white in the summer, black in the winter. The darker surface would absorb more of the sun's energy and help melt the snow and ice, while the white summer color would keep the sidewalk cool.

2. Robots that clear the snow. Can we please call them "snowbots"? And unlike iRobot's Roomba or Robomow's mowers, I really want these snowbots to be anthropomorphic. After all, we'd have to buy snow shovels for these guys, right? They'll have to be aware enough to make sure the sidewalks aren't slippery for the kids walking to school, prioritizing that over brushing off the car. And they have to want a nice hot chocolate when they're done.

3. This business of mining salt from a salt mine so we can distribute it over snowy streets all over the country seems to have a limited life. No matter how huge the salt mines are, they'll run out (kind of like the phosphorus mines, and that's really scary). And then what? It seems we need some 21st Century sewer technology that can reclaim minerals (and, more widely, pollutants) for recycling. 

4. Black snow. This would definitely make better science fiction (the black snow nanodust escapes the lab and threatens to inhabits all life!) than science fact, but my idea is that black snow would melt more quickly than white snow because it will absorb more solar energy.

5. And, of course, flamethrowers.

I've been solving puzzles in the MIT Mystery Hunt with Codex since 2003. We've always done pretty well, coming in the top three or so teams, and victory always felt a few puzzles away. Well, this past weekend, we won the MIT Mystery Hunt!

Our team was even mentioned in a Boston Globe article about this year's hunt.

We did it! Our reward? We get to plan next year's hunt, carrying on a 30-year-old tradition that has inspired similar puzzle hunts around the world.

If you're interested in the types of puzzles one finds at the MIT Mystery Hunt, here are a few that have been made publicly available (all of the puzzles probably will be available soon). Pointillisme taught me something I never knew before; I'm now a bit more worldly. (I've shamelessly borrowed this list from the Boston Globe article)

• Painted Potsherds
• Timbales
• Pointillisme
• Toad's List

When you search for "lightbulb" using a free stock photo site, you get no-frills pictures of lightbulbs that could have come straight from a hardware catalog. When you do the same search on a premium stock photo site, you find pictures that communicate the metaphors that a lightbulb represents. (Either way, I'm just looking for images to break up the text, although even better would be to have my own pictures that describe what I'm communicating)

On my bike ride to work, I pass over railroad tracks that have been inoperative for years. I noticed that the transit buses stop at the tracks, open their door, and look before crossing the track. Of course, the driver need not fear an oncoming train; the only thing he will see is a rickety track sinking beneath overgrown brush.

I thought about this. The driver is required to stop at the track because that's what he is trained to do. If he didn't stop at the tracks, he could probably get fired for not following protocol. But as long as he acts consistently at any railroad track, he reduces potential risk, and his boss will never be confused about what his driver will do when he comes across a railroad track.

However, this has some obvious inefficiencies. There is no reason for a bus to stop at a clearly unused track; this delays the passengers and other traffic behind the bus. And given enough buses with enough routes over this track, someone could probably calculate the maintenance cost that these stops require.

In the transit organization, drivers act according to their training, and bosses can predict how their employees will react in these situations. The transit organization works based on documented practices. But what about an organization that is based on knowledge of ideals instead of strict documentation -- and from these ideas, bosses can still predict how their employees will react, without specifically encoding those reactions in documentation?

I'll call such an organization an intuitive organization. In an intuitive organization, everyone can accurately predict how their teammates will act, without those actions being specifically encoded in a strict document.

Good sports teams are intuitive organizations: players know they can rely on the skills and abilities of their teammates, without knowing precisely how their teammates will execute a particular move (but with a certain degree of professional understanding and knowledge of best practices).

I think a good software team can be an intuitive organization. If I know my team well enough, I can predict how they might design a piece of software, or how they may have addressed particular technical challenges. This is about having confidence in my team and knowledge of how they work; the past is the best predictor of the future. (It should be noted that this isn't about signing up my team for work they can't possibly commit to!)

This is quite powerful. The ability to know how a teammate will act, without explicit communication and without constraint to some particular set of rules, gives an organization a dynamic, agile edge over other teams that are more by-the-book.

I sometimes hear that social sites like Facebook and Twitter will be heavyweights in the future of recommendations (or of search itself), the idea being that your friends can give you better recommendations for things like books, movies, music, and travel than random strangers can. I respectfully disagree.

First, it's hard to imagine this being the future when searching on sites social network sites is so abysmal. On Twitter, searches only go back 7 days. And while Facebook lets you search for friends, it has no decent way of searching the content of wall posts. I had to dig around pretty hard when I wanted to re-find an awesome song that a friend posted months ago.

Technical feasibility aside, there are conceptual issues with relying only on friends for recommendations. Social networks don't have the "long tail" that other sites on the Web support. For example, I have about 300 friends on Facebook, and these people tend to come from similar backgrounds as me: for the most part, we attended high school or college together, or we've worked together. Or we're related. I might value my friend's opinions on good books for summer reading, but if I'm trying to stretch my horizons, my friends are a terrible source of input, since we're so homogeneous.

Relying on Facebook or Twitter for recommendations will only benefit the socially rich, those who have thousands of diverse connections. For the rest of us, we'll have to rely on the diversity of people who aren't connected to us, but who can still influence our decisions: the people on Amazon, TripAdvisor, and other sites who tell us how good a certain book is, and what's wrong with that hotel.

The other thing that makes social network sites unsuited for recommendations is the fleeting nature of posts. On Amazon or TripAdvisor, other people's recommendations are associated with the desired object itself. But in social networks, your friends' recommendations are associated with your question. If you post a question when no one is looking, no one will answer it. If you post a question a few days after a friend posts a similar question, you won't benefit from those recommendations unless you're somehow aware of them.


I'd like to see improved search capabilities in Facebook and Twitter (why can't I search my friends based on location?), but it'll take a lot of work to rend recommendations from these sites.

Google has unveiled their new Image Search interface. Doc Searls expressed his dislike of the new search (and his growing preference for Bing's image search) on his blog, and Dave Winer tweeted his agreement. I thought I'd check out Google's new capabilities to form my own opinion.

I tested Google Image Search by searching on my own name. In the new search results, images are shown on a page in a way that makes them visually strong - this looks less a sparse collection of images, and more like a montage of big, bold pictures. Instead of pages of search results, you can scroll down the page to see more results. Moving the mouse over an image may zoom in on the image if it's not already shown at full size, and displays additional information about the picture. This was helpful when I tried to understand why there were pictures of herpes in my search results (one of the world's people named David Koelle is a medical doctor).

When you click on an image to go to the website on which it was found, Google places an overlay on the site that shades the original page and shows the image you were looking for in the middle. I found this to be an annoying extra step - my intention in clicking on the search result was to go to the original page, so why should I be presented with another instance of the image, that I then have to close so I can view the page? It would be better to have a small copy of the image in Google's right-hand pane, with a button to "Find image in page" that would automatically scroll to (and maybe highlight?) the image.

So, what about Bing? It turns out that Bing is just plain wrong. Doing a Bing Image Search for David Koelle doesn't show any of the people I know named David Koelle. I can't find my picture in the whole list, and the first actual David Koelle doesn't show up until about 100 pictures down - but it's the only accurate hit for another 100 or more pictures. Instead, I see a few images that I'm familiar with: the JFugue logo; a picture of PragPub magazine, in which I once co-wrote an article; a picture of Michael Swaine, the editor of PragPub. Otherwise, I don't recognize any of the returned images, and very few of them seem to fit my search criteria.